Parents, do you know what your kids are learning?

Do you know what your children are learning in their school’s Family Life Education class? Do you know what your children are being exposed to from their school’s Gender Sexuality Alliance club? Are they being steered towards surgery and a lifetime of pharmaceutical consumption?

I came out as bisexual and joined my school’s LGBT group. At a meeting one day, I picked up a pamphlet that for the first time gave me a detailed definition of what the T in LGBT stood for: people who feel discomfort with their biological sex and its associated gender role and who resolve the situation by presenting as a member of the opposite sex. It hit me: That’s what I am. That’s why I feel different.I’m supposed to be a man. …

I spent hundreds of hours in online forums, chewing over the nuances of gender identity and learning terms like bigender and nonbinary, searching for the right fit. Perhaps the most influential part of my exploration was a transgender support group I attended for a couple of years at the LGBT center in the town where I lived after college. … [The younger people in the support group] were enthusiastic about medical transition and encouraged me to pursue it.

I’d made a Tumblr blog, looking, really, for a space that I could have to myself to vent, and I found myself on it a lot more. There is good stuff on that website. But the nasty stuff is so easy to find and so hard to wriggle free of if you’re like I was: lonely, miserable, hollow, and utterly lost, uneasy about everything …

It’s difficult to explain what the “nasty stuff” is if you haven’t spent time on there yourself, exactly how pervasive and focused the brainwashing is, how perverse and suffocating and addictive it can be. The convoluted and illogical discourse, the constant shifting of goalposts so you are always on your toes to know what can I say? What am I allowed to think? What does this word mean today? So many lies were told to me about gender, sex, oppression, people, love, health, and happiness. … It was a real crabs-in-a-bucket mentality, where any criticism, even of downright abusive behaviour, was transphobic and/or ableist and/or racist. To suggest improving oneself, sorting out your life, was cruelty of the highest order; we were perfect as we were, they cooed, and anyone saying otherwise hated us and everyone like us. Narcissism ruled supreme.

We copied the writing style everyone else used, and we copied what they said too. They said and then we said we were beautiful. They and then we said we were against the world, the cis world, the hateful world, the world that wasn’t ideologically pure like we were ideologically pure. Nobody suffered like us. We were martyrs, floating high above reproach and deserving, more than anyone, of every good thing in the world: comfort, other people’s money. We deserved to have every rule bent for us, because we were right and they were wrong.